As humans, we instinctively believe that people should only be held responsible for what they can do.
If a person cannot meet a demand, we assume the demand must be lowered, and we often carry this into theology. Fallen humanity cannot perfectly obey God’s law. Therefore, it is assumed, God must no longer require perfect obedience.
The fall did not make God less holy, nor did it make his law less righteous. It did not transform perfect obedience from a moral necessity into trying your best, or being sincere.
That is why the gospel cannot be preached as a modified covenant of works. It is not God lowering the ladder so that weakened sinners may finally climb it. It is God giving Christ freely to sinners who have neither the righteousness nor the strength to recover themselves.
Inability ≠ Innocence
We need to make sure that we have our categories clear before we start to think through the state that fallen man finds himself.
A man born without sight cannot be blamed for failing to distinguish colors; however, his inability is not the result of a moral revolt against the nature of color. This is what makes the inability of fallen man different. It is not the inability of an innocent creature prevented from obeying by some external force. It is the inability of a creature whose nature has become corrupt through rebellion.
Fallen man does not lack the physical faculties necessary to love God; rather, what he lacks is moral rectitude. His mind is darkened, his affections disordered, and his will hostile to God. He cannot obey because he will not obey, and he will not obey because his nature is corrupt.
The natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God; the mind set on the flesh does not submit to God’s law and, indeed, cannot do so; those who are in the flesh cannot please God (1 Cor. 2:14; Rom. 8:7–8).
Yet Scripture never treats this inability as innocence.
Fisher reasons that although humanity has lost the strength to obey, “the obligation to obedience remains still.” In short, a debtor is not released merely because he has squandered the money with which he should have paid his debt. His inability to pay may deepen his misery, but it does not dissolve the creditor’s rightful claim.1
Our weakness does not soften the law because our weakness is itself part of our ruin.
The covenant of works promised life upon perfect obedience and threatened death upon disobedience. Adam possessed the natural ability and moral integrity necessary to fulfill its term. He was created upright and furnished for the obedience God required. But Adam broke the covenant.
What followed was not the cancellation of God’s moral authority. God was no longer obligated to grant Adam the promised reward of life, but Adam was not thereby released from the obedience he owed. The innocent creature had become a guilty covenant-breaker, but he remained a creature.
Fisher distinguishes the failure of the covenanting party from the release of the offended party. When one party violates a covenant, the faithful party is released from granting the promised benefit. The violator, however, is not automatically released from his obligation. Adam’s breach forfeited his claim upon the reward; it did not extinguish God’s claim upon Adam.
Thus the covenant of works remained “binding, though broken.”2
This is because the substance of the law reflects the unchanging moral relation between God and his creature. God is still God. Man is still obligated to love him with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength. The fall changes man’s condition, but it does not change God’s worthiness.
The law cannot be reduced merely because man has reduced himself.
Were God to lower his moral demand because we had become corrupt, our corruption would exercise authority over his holiness. Sin would determine the definition of righteousness. The worse humanity became, the less obedience God could justly require.
The Double Debt
Suppose Adam had repented immediately after the fall and resolved to live obediently from that moment forward. Would future obedience have restored him?
No.
Adam now owed what Fisher calls “a double debt”: satisfaction for the sin already committed and perfect obedience for the time yet to come.3
The first debt concerned his guilt, because the law had been violated.
The second debt concerned his continuing obligation. Even after sinning, Adam still owed God complete, personal, and perpetual obedience.
This means that better behavior could never cancel prior guilt. Even hypothetical perfection from the moment after the fall would not satisfy the penalty incurred by the original transgression. Future obedience would merely render what was already due for the future, but it could not become payment for the past.
Nor could suffering the penalty restore Adam to life. A sinner suffering the curse does not thereby produce the positive righteousness required for blessed communion with God.
We need pardon, but not pardon alone. We need righteousness.
The law remains holy, righteous, and good. Its inability to save is not a defect in the law but a defect in us. The law can tell us what righteousness is. It can command obedience. What it cannot do is give the righteousness it requires.
Fisher therefore says that the covenant of works was in no way capable of being renewed as a means of Adam’s recovery. Adam could not return to life by the same road from which he had fallen. He was now both guilty and morally unable to satisfy the demands resting upon him.4
To illustrate this, the law is not a ladder lying on the ground, waiting for fallen man to stand it upright again. Instead, the image that Genesis gives is the flaming sword at Eden’s gate.
Paul makes the same distinction in Romans 8. What the law could not do, weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son. The weakness was not in the righteousness of the command. The weakness was in the sinful flesh upon which the command operated.
The Gospel Is Not a Covenant of Works
Once we grasp the continuing perfection of the law, we can see why the gospel must be more than a softened Covenant of Works.
A modified covenant of works says, in effect: God once required perfect obedience, but after the fall he established more manageable conditions. He now requires faith and repentance as the terms upon which sinners may obtain life.
This scheme may speak often of Christ, grace, and faith, yet its underlying structure is still legal. Something performed in the sinner becomes the decisive condition upon which life is granted. What it says is that Christ makes salvation achievable, but the sinner’s response finally makes it actual.
The Marrow resists this confusion because the gospel does not offer sinners a method of earning life. It offers Christ.
Faith does not replace perfect obedience as a work which God has agreed to accept. Rather, faith receives the One who has rendered perfect obedience.
Christ is not God’s contribution to a cooperative plan of salvation. He is not a supplement added to the sinner’s sincere effort. He does not merely make up what remains after we have done our best. He stands in the place of those who have done nothing that could satisfy God.
Fisher describes Christ as the Surety who willingly came under the law on behalf of his people. The Son was made under the law to redeem those under it. He placed himself in the “room and place” of the faithful and assumed their covenantal burden.5
As the last Adam, Christ answers both parts of the double debt.
He renders the perfect, personal, and perpetual obedience God’s law requires, and he bears the law’s curse. The guilt of his people is laid upon him. He suffers not for sins of his own, but as the covenant Surety of sinners. Christ does what fallen Adam could not do and what Adam’s children cannot do. He fulfills the command and exhausts the condemnation.
The law is not ignored in the gospel. It is honored more fully than it could ever be honored by the everlasting condemnation of sinners. At the cross, God remains just while justifying the ungodly because the demands of justice fall upon the appointed Surety.
Christ fulfilled what we did not fulfill; He suffered what we deserved; He supplies the righteousness we do not possess, and he receives sinners not after they have repaired themselves, but while they stand before him with nothing but need.
The law says, “Do this and live.”
The sinner answers, “I have not done it, and I cannot recover what I have lost.”
The gospel declares, “Christ has done it.”
Edward Fisher, The Marrow of Modern Divinity, with notes by Thomas Boston (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1850; modernized and formatted by William H. Gross, 2014), 20.
Ibid.
Ibid., 19.
Ibid.
Ibid.